Executive summary
The goal - Optimize your supply chain
Information visibility and integration of orders, plans, supplies, inventory and shipments is crucial to successfully coordinating all aspects of your supply chain. The supply chain management solution from IBM and SAP is designed to help drive efficiency through your network, optimizing supply chain operations.
The advantage - Small changes. Big gains.
Many chemical petroleum stakeholders believe that a demand-pull supply chain is the secret to supply chain optimization. IBM doesn’t believe that’s true. Balancing supply push with demand-pull can help your company become more responsive to market demand within the constraints of this unique industry.
To be an enterprise that can respond quickly to marketplace shifts typically requires a pure demand-pull model. However, because the your industry simply cannot change refinery operations as extensively or as quickly as needed, IBM believes that the best—and most pragmatic—approach is one of balance between supply-push and demand-pull.
The benefits - Complete supply chain management
The supply chain management solution from IBM and SAP can help provide the ability to:
- Plan, execute and coordinate every aspect of your supply chain more efficiently and effectively.
- See your entire business as a group of enterprises, partners, suppliers and customers acting as a single network, rather than as single entities.
- Expand your simple inter-company communication to improve collaboration, helping to cut response times from days to hours or even seconds.
- Streamline overall operations by improving asset utilization and reducing order cycle times to create a responsive, efficient and adaptive supply chain.
- Reduce capital investment with more efficient and accurate production and distribution plans.
- Create better order fulfillment rates to expand product margins.
- Increase revenue through advanced information sharing and improved response to unanticipated changes in demand.
- Share knowledge and easily adjust to changing market conditions.
Business view
The goal - Use your supply chain to manage demand
Are you collaborating with your suppliers, vendors and customers as effectively as possible? Can you handle increased customer requirements, while shortening order and product cycle times? The supply chain management solution from IBM and SAP is designed to help streamline your overall supply chain.
The advantage - Why IBM and SAP?
The IBM and SAP alliance has combined SAP's powerful enterprise software with IBM's global e-business infrastructure to create a unified, open-standard e-business platform for over 30 years. Together, we can help you implement new systems and help get the most out of your supply chain.
- We have more than 700 joint SAP supply chain management implementations around the world, across the public and private sectors.
- IBM has established Supply Chain Research Labs with leading universities to simulate the workings of a complex supply chain.
- IBM Global Business Services has a dedicated team for implementing joint IBM and SAP Supply Chain Management projects.
- Our extensive reach and scale can help the complex, inter-enterprise and international nature of supply chains.
The benefits - Gain the most out of your supply chain
The supply chain management solution from IBM and SAP is designed to help you get the most out of every aspect of your supply chain operations, including:
- Planning—supply chain design and planning for demand and inventory, manufacturing and transportation.
- Execution—material management, warehouse management, manufacturing and order and transportation execution.
- Coordination—supply chain event and performance management.
- Collaboration—support for Collaborative Planning, Forecasting, and Replenishment (CPFR), vendor managed inventory (VMI) and supplier managed inventory (SMI).
Once implemented, our solution can help your enterprise:
- Ensure that production materials are available in the right places at the right times.
- Determine the right shipping mode, carriers and routes based on the lowest total cost of delivery, while respecting transportation constraints.
- Assess product availability across a global fulfillment network and have access to build or substitution capabilities, while improving delivery time and total cost.
- Monitor your supply chain processes and gain visibility from price quotation to product delivery.
- Check status, receive automatic alerts and integrate inventory information—from supplier to manufacturer—into existing systems.
IBM Global Business Services draws on its full breadth of supply chain management capabilities to address the challenges that clients in all industries are facing. Our consulting and implementation services can help you plan, design, implement and run your new supply chain solution. Services can include:
- Supply chain strategy
- Supply chain planning
- Logistics
- Procurement
- Asset management
- Supply chain operations
- Pro duct lifecycle management
The approach - Real world results
Plastipak competes for international contracts to supply containers and packaging. Following fivefold growth inside ten years, Plastipak's business expenses were rising. Without a global view of its manufacturing operations, the company found it hard to standardize its processes and reduce costs-key stages in its expansion program.
IBM helped Plastipak build a resilient supply chain management solution based on SAP Business Suite, working with Sirius, an IBM Premier Business Partner, and IBM Global Financing. A single IBM System i™ platform provides a scalable, flexible platform for SAP software, enabling a central view of all manufacturing operations.
- Warehouse efficiency has improved by around 14 percent.
- Pick order times have decreased by about 32 percent.
- Staffing costs have declined by some 8 percent.
- Total annual savings of approximately US$17 million have been achieved.
- Sales days outstanding have been reduced by 14 percent.
The financial advantage - Complete supply chain management solution
The supply chain management solution from IBM and SAP is designed so you can get the most out of your investment. We can help you:
- Reduce capital investment with more efficient and accurate production and distribution plans.
- Reduce costs by increasing inventory turnover on the shop floor and in the warehouse.
- Create better order fulfillment rates to expand product margins.
- Increase revenue through advanced information sharing and improved response to unanticipated changes in demand.
Technical details
The issues - Manageable infrastructure
Do you want to transform your existing linear supply chain systems into an open, adaptive supply chain network? The supply chain management solution from IBM and SAP can help integrate the planning, execution, coordination and collaboration elements of your supply chain into a successful, manageable infrastructure.
The benchmark - Proven technology
The supply chain management solution from IBM and SAP is:
- Optimized for use with open Internet standards, including HTTP, XML, Web services and J2EE™ environments.
- Certified on IBM System servers for maximum performance.
- Integrated to provide e-business solutions for businesses of all sizes.
SAP NetWeaver, a comprehensive integration and application platform, is an integral component of SAP Supply Chain Management. By reducing the need for custom integration, it helps you lower total cost of ownership and enables an Enterprise Services Architecture that allows:
- Business agility.
- Fast implementation.
- Efficient upgrades and system replacements.
- Reduced data volume and functional redundancies.
- Outsourced services.
- Increased revenues from core competencies.
- Expanded reach.
- Interoperability with IBM WebSphere®.
The components - The tools and technology you need
The supply chain management solution from IBM and SAP is designed to manage your enterprise-wide supply chain network.
Key components of the SAP Supply Chain Management solution can include:
- SAP Advanced Planner and Optimizer (SAP APO).
- SAP Business Information Warehouse (SAP BW).
- SAP Event Management.
- SAP Inventory Collaboration Hub (SAP ICH).
- SAP NetWeaver—a coherent, scalable technology platform that lets you integrate your existing technologies, while creating a foundation for a new generation of flexible, cross-enterprise processes.
IBM also offers some of the best in hardware, middleware and services.
- IBM DB2® Universal Database™
- IBM WebSphere
- IBM Tivoli® software
- IBM Lotus® software
- IBM System servers, including:
- IBM System x™ Linux™ servers
- IBM System i™ servers
- IBM System p™ UNIX® servers
- IBM System z™ servers
The implementation - Technology that works
The leading producer of enzymes, Novozymes and its customers needed to improve their existing collaborative planning forecasting and replenishment (CPFR) processes, thereby reducing inventory management and ordering burdens for its clients. Novozymes engaged IBM Global Business Services to create a more integrated and simplified supply chain framework that enables it to take over its customers' inventory management.
Key benefits of the solution included:
- 20 percent reduction in administrative costs related to demand planning.
- Vastly improved ability to optimize production planning and logistics.
The cost of ownership - Lower your total cost of ownership
The supply chain management from IBM and SAP can help you cut overall IT costs and lower total cost of ownership by offering:
- A single, flexible solution that can grow with your needs and help reduce resource expenditures.
- Open architecture that allows for quick, virtually seamless integration with new and existing systems, Internet standards such as HTTP, XML, and Web services and J2EE environments, reducing overall costs.
